Cabinets of Curiosity – Funding Success!

Bridport Arts Centre and Bridport Museum have been successfully awarded a grant by Heritage Lottery Fund to complete a project called: Cabinets of Curiosity.

The project aims to work with care homes in and around Bridport with workshops around reminiscence. Artefacts from the Museums collection will be circulated around the homes as a way of engaging the collection with the community. The residents will then create memories in the form of art and poetry lead by practitioners.

Once the workshops have been completed, the artefacts used will be stored in custom made cabinets and an exhibition of the reminiscence work with be displayed at the Arts Centre.

Curtis Fulcher, Director of Bridport Arts Centre, said: “This is wonderful news, and a massive thank you to the Heritage Lottery Fund. This project will be the first of many in store with community work at the Arts Centre. Arts with older people is a real passion of mine, I have seen the good it can do in a person’s life”.

Emily Hicks, Director of Bridport Museum, said: “ “We are really excited to start our second major collaboration with Bridport Arts Centre after our ‘Bridport Undressed’ exhibition in Summer 2017. We are only able to show about 5% of our collections on permanent display, and like to grab any opportunities to share them more widely with different people”.

Recruitment of a Project Manager is taking place, once this person is in post the project will start, with the exhibition planned for May 2019.

The project will aim to work with as many community groups as possible. One of the first phases of this work will be to work with the volunteers to train them to be Dementia Friends. If you would like to be involved in some way, contact Bridport Arts Centre on info@bridport-arts.com